by Jim Loehr
But when he returned home, for some reason he tried an experiment. “We had always used a 5-4-3-2-1 scale for employees to rate their own performance, with 5 being the best and 1 the worst,” he told me. “I was looking over the data and realized that we all mostly gave ourselves 4s and a few 2s. All the time 4s and some 2s. Fours and 2s are such noncommittal scores. I realized that no one was owning up to how they were doing. So I simplified the scale to 5-3-1. Five meant you exceeded your task, 3 that you met it, 1 that you missed it. Much simpler. And I noticed that now when I measured myself at the end of each day, I kept giving myself 3s. Finally I could confirm what I had long suspected: that I was doing everything in a mediocre way. Why? Because I was multi-tasking. I collected data from others and they, too, were always giving themselves 3s. It was all half-assed.”
What did he do? He added a ritual to the start of the workday (or the night before): He would identify the three things he wanted to get finished that workday—never more than three. At the end of each day, he used his 5-3-1 scale to rate himself. “Now I was giving myself 5s all the time. I found that I actually got more accomplished, more completed—and at a higher level—than when I was doing lots of things. Which in turn created more elasticity in my day to take on more tasks—only now, when a new task came before me, I was sensitive about being fully engaged by it. I had to be focused, present. I stopped multi-tasking at meetings and suddenly they became shorter, crisper. Our operating efficiency improved threefold. Plus, it’s been more enjoyable getting there.”
Learning to invest your full and best energy in whatever you’re doing at that moment is what I call “full engagement,” a paradigm we’ve developed over more than two decades, which posits at its core that life is enriched because of the commitment, passion, and focus we give it, not the time we give it. Two years ago, I did several off-site workshops with partners from KPMG, the Big Four accounting firm, and their spouses. I’d been invited by Gene O’Kelly, their chairman and CEO, who was intent on improving the firm’s culture by achieving greater balance between his workforce’s professional and personal lives. The workshops went well, Gene felt, and he and I were in contact in the months following as he told me enthusiastically how the “energy, not time” concept was flourishing at the firm, and about some of the specific changes the company had implemented: encouraging more nutritious eating (and making healthier foods more available); encouraging work breaks, including stretching and walking; encouraging periodic disengagement, better sleep, programming in more family time so that it didn’t just disappear at the bottom of an endless to-do list. He talked about how the concept was starting to resonate in his own life, too—how he was trying to engage more fully in what he was working on at the moment, rather than always focusing on his six-month or twelve-month plan. Then, in the spring of 2005, tragedy slammed Gene and his family: He was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and given three to six months to live. At age fifty-three, he’d been happily married for more than twenty-five years and had two daughters, one of whom was only thirteen. One day he’d been at the top of the business world, with everything going his way; the next, he was given a death sentence. And yet, extraordinarily, by applying some of what he learned about energy and engagement, he discovered only in his final months that for years—for decades—he’d been living, in many ways, in the future, with his eye always trained on the next eighteen months, or the next month, or the next day; working to the top, he didn’t have so much use for the present day. While there were other important influences working on him in his extraordinary final few months, his commitment to deeply engaging in the moment provided him a peace and even joy as he approached death that was breathtaking. As he took account of his last months, he claimed that his newly fully-engaged-in-the-present moments—dubbed “Perfect Moments,” which could sometimes be strung together to make “Perfect Days”—allowed him “more Perfect Moments and Perfect Days in two weeks than I had in the last five years, or than I probably would have in the next five years, had my life continued the way it was going before my diagnosis.”
Full engagement represents the greatest quantity, highest quality, most precise focus and greatest intensity of energy invested in whatever one is doing at the time. Even dying.
THE LIE OF TIME
There’s a story we tell ourselves that says time is everything. We believe in this story so deeply that it has spawned an industry—the “time management” industry. Time management has helped us in significant ways: It has allowed us (to name just a few benefits) to allocate time and other resources more strategically in the service of our objectives; to plan more intelligently; to be more precise; to avoid being late or missing critical events.
But despite all the good things time management has meant in our lives, it makes a promise—a tragic promise—that it can’t deliver on. Ever. And every one of us who believes in this promise (almost all of us, at one time or another) is victimized by it. Past and present and—if we continue to believe it—future, too.
The promise we believe in, the one that is simply not true and can never be true, goes like this:
All time is sacred. Because we have so little time here on this planet, we must make every second count. To find meaning and harmony and to make sense of our life, we need to decide what has real value for us; must distinguish what matters from what doesn’t. Once we determine true value in our lives, then we can invest time, very deliberately, in that which we care about most. And if we do this—just this—then we’ve virtually guaranteed our lives will have meaning and dimension, and the relationships and activities we invest our time in will “grow.” Our lives will be fundamentally aligned with what we care about most.
So goes the promise, which is absolutely, unequivocally, 100% false.
Why? Because simply investing time in something is meaningless. It has zero value. The pervasive notion that simply by being there for the dinner, or the get-together, or the meeting, or any other activity earns you some “positive return” for your mere physical presence…how can that be anything but nonsense? If you’re there but you’re consumed by anger, distractions, fatigue—really, what does it mean?
Suppose your son has asked you repeatedly to attend one of his soccer games. For almost his whole season you’ve just been swamped, and now one game remains, the final, pivotal game. If they win, they make the playoffs. Your son begs you to come to this one, and you decide, yes: It’s important for you to be there.
So you block out four hours in the middle of a workday. Your goal is to let your son see that you really care about him and his activities. You arrive at the game five minutes early, spend the whole time at the game—every last minute—then the two of you drive home together. Is that not devotion? Is that not full of meaning and love?
Well, let’s see about that. Suppose a video camera were trained on you for the afternoon. What might the videotape show?
For starters, you spend fully three-quarters of the time nervously walking up and down the field, talking on the cell phone. Most of the time you’re on the phone—all business-related calls, naturally—you take in the action on the field only dimly; when you look out, you aren’t (indeed, can’t be) concentrating fully. Whenever your son looks your way he sees a man only marginally interested in what he’s looking at.
On two occasions, you grow animated because the referee doesn’t know what he’s doing; once a high school soccer star yourself, you know a thing or two. On the first instance, the ref misses a serious infraction and you just light into him from the sideline. It soon becomes clear to everyone that you know more about soccer than anyone there. Do you consider that you may have humiliated the ref? No, you don’t, and then, there he goes and goofs again, this time on a rule interpretation, one that threatens to cost your son’s team the game (in the end, it does not).
With two minutes left to go, your son has a wide-open chance to score—and he spaces. The opportunity is gone in an instant. You are dumbfounded, at first, then go a
little berserk on the sideline, then calm yourself a bit.
The final whistle blows. Your son and his teammates walk off the field. They will not be going to the playoffs.
Looking at the videotape, one would see that you tap your son on the back of the neck.
“Nice game,” you say.
“I really screwed up,” he says. “I should have scored.”
“How could you space out like that?” you say, unable to help yourself. “You gotta concentrate at all times!”
Your son shakes his head, distraught. You shake your head and give him one more tap. “Hop in the car,” you say, and he does, and you do, and you both drive off.
Later, when you think about it, you tell yourself that you took off an entire afternoon from work (four hours!), got there before the game started, and stayed to the end. Your mission? To let your son know how much you cared about him.
Instead, you have just succeeded in moving the needle backward.
In my years doing what I do now, and my years as coach, I have personally witnessed or heard about this scene, and others in precisely the same spirit, too many hundreds of times to count.
It couldn’t happen unless we continued to carry flawed, tragic assumptions about time. If you’re going to show up in name only, time has zero value.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF ENERGY PROBLEM
Are we almost out of fuel to run the world?
For years we’ve been asking this question about our petroleum supply. It’s an important, frightening question. But I’m at least as interested in a slight variation on it: Are we almost out of human fuel to run the world?
After all, for years business demands have only increased. Employees have had to adapt to the pressure of increasing shareholder value and improving profitability. We now consume “human” energy at unprecedented levels. Yet for far too many of us, the human energy well has run dangerously dry. Is it ironic that so much of the working population is failing, or close to failing, at developing and harnessing the very resource—energy—that makes it possible for them to be productive and constructive? Or is it just plain scary—for them individually, as well as for their companies and the country?
Since March 2003, 100,000 people from all over the world have provided us at HPI with important (and frightening) insights into their individual energy crises as well as our collective one, by answering our personal energy management questionnaire. From the data we’ve collected, the broad answer to my question is yes: At least half of us are running dangerously low on human fuel. The number of survey respondents who say, for example, that they are “fully engaged”—in that positive, balanced state of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy—is 4%. Four percent? In polling terms, that’s in the category of “statistically irrelevant.” At the other end of the energy scale, 4% of respondents say they are “toxically disengaged,” impoverished in every key realm of life. (The 360 evaluations of the participants by their colleagues, friends, and family paint a somewhat different picture: According to them, 18% of our clientele, not 4%, is toxically disengaged.) This segment lacks vision and purpose (they report), their emotions are stunted, they never feel fully rested, they feel they don’t have the resources to improve their lot. In many cases, they’ve simply given up. In their poignant, alarmingly telling write-in comments, many of them confess that their daily lives are ruled by two emotional states: anger and frustration.
Count 51% of the total among the “disengaged.” This group feels challenged in many of the ways the really down-and-out 4% do, but they at least feel some hope for their situations. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they claim to have no clue about how to put their hope to work.
The final 42% consider themselves “engaged.” While they score themselves as fairly balanced, half of them feel significantly disengaged in the physical realm—eating, exercising, sleeping, recovering. Now, it’s great that they feel adequately fulfilled about their emotional, mental, and spiritual energy—I’m not at all belittling that—but physical energy, as we’ll see in a few pages, is the foundational source for all of our energy. Too much more physical disengagement for people in this category and who knows which other realms of their life will begin to crumble.
In my travels around America to giant multinational corporations and mid-sized organizations, I’ve met far, far too many “dead people walking”—forty-year-olds, even thirty-year-olds, whose bodies, theoretically, still enjoy the capacity to repair themselves quickly with minimal care, feeding, and recovery, yet whose lives, particularly jobs, make more and more demands on them until, finally, they’ve started to break down physically, the light slowly leaving them. In sport, this condition is called overtraining. No amount of youthful vigor can alter this basic equation: You cannot expend more energy than you create. Ask any physicist. I don’t care what kind of “stud” or “tough guy” or “animal” or “winner” you are, the kind of employee willing always to put in more hours than anyone else. You can’t change that truth, which holds for all energy, including human. You simply can’t. It’s an impossibility. And it’s not just a math equation that doesn’t work. It’s a story that doesn’t work.
To answer my own question again: Yes, there is a human energy crisis. Yes, I’m worried about our collective ability to survive and thrive in the world. Each individual energy crisis robs that person of the ability to participate, and participate well, in his or her own life, in the workplace, in society.
A staggering number of comments from our survey tell us that people want to take better care of themselves—and yet feel blocked from those practices that would nurture them physically at work, at home, and in the community. They mostly eat and sleep badly, and exercise intermittently and ineffectively, if they can.
The most precious resource we have as human beings is our energy. Most of us, however, give little attention to responsibly managing this finite resource. We are quick to acknowledge the importance of skillfully managing time and money but, for whatever reason, fail to apply the same logic and sense of urgency to managing our energy. We consume energy with little or no regard for where it comes from or how it is produced. When the demands of life require more energy, we simply expect our bodies to ante up more of it. When the additional energy isn’t there, we’re mystified and frustrated.
One metaphor I use in our workshop is that of the “smart bomb.” The military uses the term to mean a bomb that can make course corrections, after it’s been launched, to hit its target: To make such corrections, the bomb must always be able to identify two clear coordinates, both of which are computed via precise GPS calculations.
Where it is at the moment. Where it’s meant to end up.
If a smart bomb could identify neither of these coordinates, or only one, then it wouldn’t—it couldn’t—hit its target. It would be incapable of making the in-air course corrections necessary to succeed at its mission. It would not be inaccurate to call such a projectile a “dumb bomb.”
You have been launched, long ago. You are following a trajectory, one whose route and velocity have been greatly determined by your parents and others. Are you content to continue in the direction you’re going? Do you know both your position right now and your destiny? (Even the staunchest pacifists in our workshop tend to appreciate the analogy.) Do you have the ability to recognize where you are at any moment on your flight path? Do you have a clear sense of the target you wish to reach? If you don’t, then how can you possibly make course corrections, in the midst of life, necessary to achieve your desired goal? Does your business—which, like each human, has a trajectory—have a clear sense of what it is and where it wants to go?
Individuals and businesses capable of making informed course corrections do well. Those who can’t, fail. If you simply accept the trajectory you’re on, you probably won’t end up anywhere near where you want to go.
Here’s the thing, though: While course corrections are made mainly through storytelling—that is, you must continually art
iculate, even write out, where you are and where you’re going, if you’re to embed these coordinates in your guidance system—even good storytelling will leave you nowhere if you don’t properly manage your energy. Because even with both coordinates magnificently calculated, if you run out of energy before the journey is completed, guess what? You’ll fall out of the sky. You’ll fall short, probably way short, of the mark you meant to hit. And it wasn’t that you lacked clarity; you lacked energy.
If you mind that your life trajectory is being compared to a bomb’s, here’s one meaningful way in which they depart: a bomb has a single target. You have multiple targets. To hit all of them, or most, you need to be extraordinary at managing your energy.
We must create a plan of action to rewrite this story, the one in which so many of us lack the energy to hit our targets. Before we can do that, though, there’s another question to answer: How did the Old Story get started? And who’s to blame for it?
The business world is, I believe, the biggest culprit.
In many ways, the business culture is responsible for this human energy crisis (and, by extension, for a good deal of our nation’s health care crisis but, again, that’s for a whole other book). Business leaders pay lip service, if that, to the notion that workers should of course take care of themselves, but for the most part they don’t consider it “business-relevant” for the company to help the worker in this endeavor. That’s something you do on your own time.
But wait: Aren’t business leaders looked to as role models? And, but for a few, mostly maverick exceptions (Malcolm Forbes, Ted Turner, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates after he turned into a public philanthropist), isn’t the primary behavior being modeled called “workaholism”?
At a recent leadership meeting I attended for a Fortune 100 company, a C-level executive said, “You only have twenty-four hours in the day. There are three things you must be concerned with. Your job, your family, and yourself. For me, it has always been about my job and my family. I have always put ‘me’ on the back burner.”